PC Problem...

[rockmanj]

There was nothing I could do except format it; it would not read at all. It seems to be working now, but I have lost everything. Not as upsetting as I thought it would have been. Thanks though!

[David75]

There was nothing I could do except format it; it would not read at all. It seems to be working now, but I have lost everything. Not as upsetting as I thought it would have been. Thanks though!

Next time, try to find tools to rebuild the partition table. I admitt I never tried that myself.
I don't know if you did a low level format. If not, maybe some recovery tools might be of help. the only problem is that it's painfully slow (like a surface scan) and you get contiguous data best which is less and less probable with the size of today's files.

Now be aware that the same joke is bound to happen.
Is that an external drive you built yourself with an external enclosure and a drive you retrofitted or is that an already built one?
I ask because what you describe happens more frequently with external enclosures. Not that it matters now, but be prepared it should happen again.

[Animeniax]

@rockmanj: Are you going to trust that harddrive with your data going forward? I wouldn't. Harddrives are so cheap these days, and you can easily buy a new internal HDD and install it into the enclosure (might take some modification).

For me, once bitten, p.o.s. goes into the trash.

[Kraco]

Actually HDs aren't cheap right now, Ani. Not since they needed to (temporarily, I hope) close down factories in Thailand due to the floods. If you have a look at the prices, they've almost doubled compared to a few months ago. 1TB drive costs as much now as a 2TB drive cost in September.

[Animeniax]

Ahhh, no wonder prices seemed a little high from what I remembered. I have to recommend to customers to replace their harddrives sometimes and when I showed them prices, they seemed more expensive than before. I didn't know about the factory shutdowns in Thailand.

Still not a good idea to trust your data to a faulty harddrive.

[rockmanj]

Yea, I know. I will likely get a new HDD once I start a new job and use that one just for stuff I don't care too much about.

[UChessmaster]

I need help with this laptop, the right key is suddenly pressing itself at random but often times, the key itself doesn`t works unless i hit it hard, anyone has any idea?

[Buffalobiian]

I need help with this laptop, the right key is suddenly pressing itself at random but often times, the key itself doesn`t works unless i hit it hard, anyone has any idea?

Something jammed in there?

[UChessmaster]

I checked nothing in there, i think it might be a virus. but i know nothing about anti viruses :/

[Buffalobiian]

I checked nothing in there, i think it might be a virus. but i know nothing about anti viruses :/

That.... would be a pretty lousy virus, lol.

Avast is the free antivirus I recommend. You can also just go to norton/symantec's site and run their security/antivirus scanner to a check. If the virus is aggressive enough that it stops you from installing a new AV or doing an online scan/update, you'll have to either wipe the OS/HDD, or take the HDD out of the laptop and plug it into an uninfected working PC with antivirus running in order to get rid of it.

I'm not confident that it's a virus though.

[Kraco]

Sounds very much like a broken switch. We have a trackball at work with the left button sometimes jamming down, yet still not connecting. It's quite annoying.

Laptop keyboards are quite compact things, so it might be hard to do anything about it, but you could have a look. I assume it's not under warranty anymore.

[Killa-Eyez]

I have to agree with Buff and Kraco that it's probably not a virus. You could however try a fresh install of your OS, since that's probably cost free, and see if that might help. I doubt it though. It really sounds like your keyboard's malfunctioning.

As I recall all laptops and notebooks have removable keyboards. Buy a can of compressed air and a long haired soft brush, get the keyboard out and clean the thing, see if it helps. Maybe it's some goo from some sweet, half dried beverage. In that case some cleaning alcohol and cue tips will come in handy. If you're having trouble getting the keyboard out, look up the manufacturers service manual for your model on it's website.

Ultimately, if the above did not help or you don't want to spend money on the can and alcohol, there are keyboards available on ebay from $3.99 (assuming you live in the US). Good luck.

[Buffalobiian]

Has firefox been rendering pages rather slowly as of late for anybody? Things seem to be blurry initially, then crisp a moment later.

The moment seems a little too long however, and I'm talking mostly about text, less so pictures.

[Animeniax]

I've been having problems with stability and load times in Firefox so I switched to Google Chrome on my main PC. Seems to work much better. I think Mozilla is releasing new versions of Firefox with new features too fast, and not doing enough quality control on previous releases.

[David75]

I've been having problems with stability and load times in Firefox so I switched to Google Chrome on my main PC. Seems to work much better. I think Mozilla is releasing new versions of Firefox with new features too fast, and not doing enough quality control on previous releases.

firefox keeps a cache and many files that it needs to read all the time and even more so at start.
I guess that over time it becomes bloated and slows the whole thing.
They also realized they did not control how extensions were working, particularly the way they manage memory, and came to see some extensions never release ram even when not in use and/or keep increasing their ram size over time.
So they decided to rule ram allocated to extensions better.
These are examples I remember, there are many more optimizations needed they are probably already looking after.

[Animeniax]

firefox keeps a cache and many files that it needs to read all the time and even more so at start.
I guess that over time it becomes bloated and slows the whole thing.
They also realized they did not control how extensions were working, particularly the way they manage memory, and came to see some extensions never release ram even when not in use and/or keep increasing their ram size over time.
So they decided to rule ram allocated to extensions better.
These are examples I remember, there are many more optimizations needed they are probably already looking after.

I'd always heard that Firefox was a poor resource/memory manager, so you'd always seeing it consume beaucoup memory in task manager. Never read up on it, but that's interesting that it was extensions and add-ons that contributed a lot to the problem. Still, I'm liking Google Chrome much better, though I want to fight the beast (like Walmart).

[Buffalobiian]

My biggest problem with firefox is that it will eat up an entire core of CPU doing something. Flash executables running under Firefox.exe also consume lots of cpu resources. Battlelog requires a browser to join servers, so I've been using Chrome (and close firefox) to do that now instead, even though I still use the latter for normal browsing just out of habit and aesthetics.

My PC couldn't boot just now because I screwed on the heat sink too tightly. It probably shorted it by contacting the case or something.. I don't know. Anyway, for the record the symptoms were infinite reboots with no beeps nor images. Reboots are around 2 second apart.

[Animeniax]

Whoa, just found out all the crashes, problems waking from sleep, and general shittiness of my gaming PC are most likely due to an old ATI 6950HD that I was still using. I did the 6970 unlock mod to get the extra performance and ran the ATI performance boosting software as required. I always thought it was the SATA controller (Marvell and Intel both have known issues with their SATA controller on the X58 Bloomfield platform). I also had a problem where I bent some of the socket pins and had to manually bend them back into place, which made me think that I'd have to replace the motherboard and CPU in order to solve them crashing issues. That wasn't a great option since most people say an upgrade from Bloomfield to Haswell isn't worth it, but I didn't want to wait for the next generation chip because crashing on your gaming PC is unbearable.

Now I just need to get an Nvidia 760 and that solves my PC issues for $250 and will still be good when I do replace the mobo/CPU.

[Buffalobiian]

I've bought a GTX670 so I suppose I could try the same thing in my situation too.

Basically I've been having a lot of BSODs for a while now with various error codes but all to do with ntoskrnl.exe (which doesn't actually diagnose the problem). I can reproduce a BSOD every single time by simultaneously:

1) transferring a Diablo 3 folder from HDD1 to HDD2
2) transferring all the program files from HDD3 to HDD4
3) playing music while I do so.

I'm not sure which or if all of the above are necessary, but it's never been able to complete the entire lot successfully. It's just what I'm doing to test for stability anyway since this can reliably tick it off while memtests and intelburntests don't pick up anything. Prime might do it eventually but that will take too long.

I've used various system images and even an old system HDD that still had my C:\ from my pre-ssd days, and they all give the same errors. I'm fairly certain that it's my mobo/cpu/ram that's causing it, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to put in my gfx card and replace the HD5870 while I'm at it.

I didn't really want to replace that combo until the end of the year, but if it comes down to it.. I'm fairly happy to do so. I'd be looking at an i5-4670, maybe an Asrock Z87 Extreme4.. haven't sorted out the ram yet, but probably something 1866MHz. I think a slim profile Noctua CPU cooler would be the most accessible one for my purposes. Promeltech and Thermalright stuff are rather hard to find.

Let us know what you find Ani. You suggest that you've got a high suspicion that it's the graphics card, but you can't really confirm that until you've replaced it.

[Animeniax]

I'm not sure which or if all of the above are necessary, but it's never been able to complete the entire lot successfully. It's just what I'm doing to test for stability anyway since this can reliably tick it off while memtests and intelburntests don't pick up anything. Prime might do it eventually but that will take too long.

So it only BSODs when running all of those operations at the same time? Seems like a RAM issue to me. Do you have replacement RAM available to swap out? Buying new RAM would still be future proof, though I'm out of the loop on new technologies, you should be able to use DDR3 for another few years.

Let us know what you find Ani. You suggest that you've got a high suspicion that it's the graphics card, but you can't really confirm that until you've replaced it.

It's not a suspicion, I took the 770GTX from my work gaming PC home for the spring break (I wanted to run BF4 on high settings instead of medium with the 6970) and the home gaming PC has been rock solid for the past 4 days, with all the previous issues I mentioned apparently resolved. It's expensive having to buy parts for two PCs, but worth it.

@Kraco: you'll probably have to run the system in place (in the case in this situation) to see what's causing the noise. It could be vibration from the PSU contacting the case, or a cable rubbing a fan. OCZ products don't have the best reputation for reliability, just pushing the envelope for performance.